Heather A. Williams facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Heather A. Williams
|
|
|---|---|
| Alma mater | Saint Ann's School Harvard College Harvard Law School |
| Occupation | Professor |
| Employer | University of Pennsylvania |
|
Notable work
|
Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery |
| Title | Presidential Professor and Professor of Africana Studies |
Heather A. Williams is an expert in Africana Studies, which is the study of African American history and culture. She is also a lawyer. Currently, she is a special professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Early Life and Education
Heather Andrea Williams moved from Jamaica to the United States when she was 11 years old. She went to Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York.
Later, she studied at Harvard College and graduated in 1978. She then earned a law degree (called a J.D.) from Harvard in 1981.
Legal Career
After law school, Heather Williams worked as a lawyer for the government. She was an assistant attorney general for New York State. This means she helped represent the state in legal matters.
She also worked as a trial attorney for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In this role, she helped protect the civil rights of people across the country.
Becoming a Professor
After her legal career, Williams taught history at Saint Ann's School for two years. She then went back to school. In 2002, she earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.
She spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at Smith College. From 2004 to 2014, she taught history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2014, she became a special professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Important Books
Heather Williams has written several important books. Her book Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery was published in 2012. This book is about the special advertisements that formerly enslaved people placed after slavery ended. They used these ads to try and find family members they had lost.
People have said her book is "superbly researched." This means she did a lot of careful work to find information for the book.
List of Works
- Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
- Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
- American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
